Using applicationName to enable credential sharing in ASP.NET 2.0

One of the things many folks want to do as soon as they start playing with the Membership provider in ASP.NET 2.0 is to share a single credential database across multiple applications. And of course, most folks don't want to just run their applications locally, they want to copy them to a production server.

In both cases, it's possible to run into issues if you don't set the applicationName property for your application. Scott Guthrie put together a nice post a couple of months ago that explains what applicationName does and why it's so useful. He also recommends this rollup of information he's posted on Membership, Roles, Security, etc.